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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Mega By-Election Week : Day One (February 21st 2017)
politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Mega By-Election Week : Day One (February 21st 2017)
This week will see six by-elections but not all on the same day. There is a by-election tonight, three tomorrow night and on Thursday two Parliamentary by-elections that may break a duck that has lasted anything from 35 years to 57 years and create a vacancy at the head of the Opposition. But first, as they say in all the great stage plays, we have the opening curtain
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Are we expecting a vote in the Lords tonight?
@danielmawbs
Good spot. That is a decent value bet.
As Met Office forecasts winds of up to 80mph, party sources voice concern about voter turnout in Copeland and Stoke"
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/21/storm-doris-could-blow-away-labour-byelection-hopes-mps-fear-copeland-stoke
Oh, my coat?
Just who are these "Labour party sauces" ?
According to "sources" Labour are going to finish 4th in Copeland, lose Stoke to the Tories. Now this Doris hooey
And two holds.
Well that would be christmas day come early for them.
https://twitter.com/hendopolis/status/834166542719995909
What Davis' comment DOES bring into question however is why on earth we're leaving the single market in these circumstances.
All the immigration and twice the tariffs.
https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/0107d7bb587532d9df91998238f9bc59ea87802d/0_551_1428_857/master/1428.jpg?w=1920&q=55&auto=format&usm=12&fit=max&s=f24a1b1c10fc91e14277dc660ff0b1f7
Theresa May's spin doctor looks suspiciously like him in a wig....
Why aren't we talking about them challenging Labour in the north? When did they resign that?
Copeland is lower priority.
If these big businesses are complaining that British workers don't have the skills to fill their jobs, then the answer could be.....for those businesses to train and skill those British workers themselves?
Getting nowhere!
:rolls eyes:
Brexit and market forces, doncha just love it?
The reason that many low end jobs go to migrants is the way the benefits system discourages work. Get a hard, not pleasant job - congratulations, you will be pennies better off. Marginal effective tax rates of 90% etc....
Why can't a hundred houses be built in a thousand suburbs each year rather than a new city each year?
Of course, some businesses may simply be unviable if they paid the wages they would need to recruit British workers, but you do have to wonder. I had a lot of Polish friends who came over post-accession, working minimum wage jobs - when I visited them, they were living in conditions that I would never have been prepared to take on (sleeping several to a room, doing all their non-food shopping at charity shops etc) and yet they felt better off than they were in Poland.
Did it really make economic sense for a university lecturer with a PhD in biochemistry, or an educator with a Masters from the most prestigious degree in Poland, to be slaving away long hours in rural England in crappy minimum wage work where they were frequently violently assaulted? (Not by racists I hasten to add, but because they were working as carers for people with various mental health issues.) Or their friends who had come over to work stacking warehouse shelves, or in the food factories, or in the naff end of retail?
Didn't seem a very efficient deployment of human capital. Would those shelves have gone unstacked if business owners had been prepared to pay the kind of wage that doesn't leave you, in your mid-30s, renting a run-down house where you're crammed several people to a bedroom? Or if they'd invested in some technology to improve the productivity?
I appreciate I'm making a different point to the training issue. But the general public seem to have less of an issue with people coming over who possess valuable skill-sets, and are here to use them, than with the low-wage migration.
We do not need new housing for immigrants - we just need new housing and we have needed it for decades. That is why housing here is expensive, short supply drives up price. But we do, of course, build new housing in the cheapest way by bunging it in to any available space so the developers do not need to lay new, expensive sewers, services and roads. New estates just open up on to existing roads and services and cause all sorts of problems for people other than the developers.
There needs to be a rational conversation that is not "mega-urgent" or filled with superlatives. I am not sure that it has happened that way for a very long time. So we rush from mess to mess making it worse as we go....
The marginal tax rates (okay, counting benefit withdrawal as a tax, but incentives matter, as economics say) of 70-90% and above weren't even just a weird anomaly that happened in a limited part of the income spectrum. They were pretty pernicious, from what I remember.
Yet another argument for universal basic income / negative income tax / structuring the Universal Credit properly...
Scott_P said: '@chrisshipitv: Labour source says the party now fears losing Stoke by-election to Conservatives more than it does losing to UKIP.'
This kind of warning/expectation management has become the norm for Labour in recent by-elections when they are defending safe seats. But it can't do Labour any harm to push the threat of a Tory rather than UKIP gain as part of their GOTV operation, especially if voter apathy is the biggest concern they face defending the seat?
@Charles - "That sounds very like a movie plot from a couple of years ago (not Gone Girl but the trailers were at a similar time). I think the twist was that the psychiatrist to whom she was talking was actually here husband who has attempted to murder her.
You might want to check (I think there is a way of doing these things)"
I haven't seen it, but I think the movie you are alluding to is 'Before I go to Sleep' starring Nicole Kidman and Colin Firth?
Food in the UK has never been so cheap but try putting it up and see the reaction. The truth is that if we want to continue living like this then we need immigrants. It is not just food, the care sector is another place that nobody except immigrants seems to want to work in, so either we start looking after our own elderly relatives, pay lots more for care, or.... we keep letting immigrants come in.
Cutting immigration is going to hurt. A lot.
Then people wonder why there are long term unemployed.
Then the benefit system gives more money to parents who separate, rather than live together. Then people comission documentaries on why there are so many single parents among the benefit class.
Having said that, I've talked to folk in e.g. Wisbech (70% leave!) who would in the past have seen the crop work as a welcome summer top-up, and felt it had become essentially impossible once the Poles/Lithuanians/Ukrainians/Romanians (and to some extent Turks and Portuguese before) had taken it over. Agencies who arranged the work would recruit in Polish, for instance - the whole affair felt alien to the Brits who would at one point have been involved.
But I don't think sitting around and waiting til summer to see if (depending on the harvest!) you're going to get some work this year, is a happy or productive use of life. Like many other jobs that have gone the way of the dodo, this one is a bit rubbish really.
His malign work is done. Maybe he will get a Presidential pardon.
I mentioned yesterday that the three main candidates scores were converging on Betfair and that the trend would continue if a poll finally showed Fillon ahead of Macron.
And then we had on with Elabe's poll yesterday:
- with Bayrou: Le Pen 27(+2) Fillon 20 (+3) Macron 17 (-5) Mélenchon 12(=) Hamon 12(-3) Bayrou 6, others 6
- without Bayrou: Le Pen 28 (+2) Fillon 21 (+3) Macron 18.5 (-5) Mélenchon 13 (=) Hamon 13 (-2) Others 6.5
The two daily Rolling polls (Ifop and Opinion way) have Macron and Fillon tied (both at 21 for Opinonway, 19 for Ifop)
The impact on Betfair was clear with fillon going from 3rd to 1st at 3.05, Macron easing at 3.35 and and Le Pen at 3.5.
It seems pretty accurate as none of the favorites is clearly leading
- Fillon has a solid base but is still quite far below Le Pen. His first job (close the gap with Macron) is done but now he has to create a gap of his own (only Elabe has him 3 points ahead) to change the narrative. Fueled by media adoration for Macron, the polls still show that people think of Macron as the most likely winner, even as he is losing ground.
- Macron would be weakened if Bayrou enters the race (he should make an announcement on Wednesday) and is now on a downward trend. He has to stop it quickly and for that he has to start talking about his precise views on all subjects and stop the televangelist fudge (in his Toulon meeting lastweek he informed his fans that "I understand you and I love you all"). The problem is that he will have to make choices and thus energize some supporters but disappoint others. he is currently the only candidate refusing tv debates and I think that it's a mistake.
- Le Pen is still on course for a very high first round result, and her second round numbers are trending up. She is nevertheless at least 12 points behind and has still a mountain to climb to win. The difficulty for her is to continue to energize her supporters with the growing prospect of victory, while avoiding to boost the turnout of opponents.
The debates could seal the deal but she could also be challenged by strong debaters such as Mélenchon or Fillon.
One major problem for her is that she cannot attack Fillon on his parliamentary expenses issues because she has the exact same problem (and the judicial process is actually much clearer and further advanced - a thing that inexplicably the Fillon-hating press in France does not point out...)
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/feb/21/losing-banking-jobs-to-eu-threatens-financial-stability-across-europe
Note this bit:
[Sir Howard Davies, the chairman of Royal Bank of Scotland and a former deputy governor of the Bank of England] , who spends part of his time as a professor at the Sciences Po university in Paris, said: “There clearly is a risk of a disorderly Brexit if it becomes politically very unpleasant. I’m slightly anxious about the fact that what I hear when I go over to the other side of the Channel is all they are focusing on is the size of the [settlement] bill and that seems to me not particularly well understood in the debate here."
That's exactly the same point which I made here earlier today.
They are trialling something like the Oyster on Manchester's Metro.